India, home to some of humanity's oldest medicinal knowledge, recently got an unwanted education in modern western patent laws. In 1995, the US Patent Office awarded a patent to the University of Mississippi for the use of Turmeric to treat wounds.

Turmeric has been used by Indian healers, in the exact method patented, for centuries. After the patent, treating a wound with Turmeric briefly became a violation of US patent law. The modern intellectual property framework took a centuries-old medicinal tradition and made it property, but not India's property.

Luckily, India learns fast. Under the government's direction, large numbers of Indian scholars worked to create a database of indigenous knowledge to help challenge patents of this sort. The database, known as the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, includes information on many aspects of Indian culture that go far beyond medicine. The database contains information on all manner of Indian knowledge potentially at risk of privatization. And the threat is real: even yoga positions -- ancient methods of stretching and breathing -- have been copyrighted by private entities in the US.

Rather than embracing the US model and claim Indian copyrights and patents on Indian knowledge, the government is sharing this knowledge with the world. I think Prithviraj Chavan, the minister of state in the Prime Minister’s Office, summed it up rather nicely:

We have translated this into five languages and put it in the public domain. We are more than willing to share this knowledge with scholars but pharmaceutical companies won’t be able to claim patents on this.

The medicinal knowledge is safely returned to the public domain -- where it has existed for centuries -- and this new database will (hopefully) keep it there. Intellectual property law in the US has reached a point of insanity and kudos to the Indian government for not allowing their culture's knowledge to be privatized.